a night as this--so vast and fearful, but so futile in its bitter sweep
about the fire--that while one listens one must really dream too.




[Illustration: The ice crop]

III

THE ICE CROP

The ice-cart with its weighty tongs never climbs our Hill, yet the
icechest does not lack its clear blue cake of frozen February. We
gather our own ice as we gather our own hay and apples. The small
ice-house under the trees has just been packed with eighteen tons of
"black" ice, sawed and split into even blocks, tier on tier, the
harvest of the curing cold, as loft and cellar are still filled with
crops made in the summer's curing heat. So do the seasons overlap and
run together! So do they complement and multiply each other! Like the
star-dust of Saturn they belt our fourteen-acre planet, not with three
rings, nor four, but with twelve, a ring for every month, a girdle of
twelve shining circles running round the year--the tinkling ice of
February in the goblet of October!--the apples of October red and ripe
on what might have been April's empty platter!

He who sows the seasons and gathers the months into ice-house and barn
lives not from sunup to sundown, revolving with the hands of the clock,
but, heliocentric, makes a daily circuit clear around the sun--the
smell of mint in the hay-mow, a reminder of noontime passed; the